1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to computer systems and methods of presenting information to multiple users who may need to look at the same, similar and/or different information, and more specifically, to computer systems and computer implemented methods of synchronization of multiple web information presences to present information to multiple users who may need to look at the same, similar and/or different information.
2. Background of the Related Art
There is a vast amount of information in the world today that is available by computer. For example, on the World Wide Web alone there are millions of browsers and millions of web pages. In addition to the Internet, companies have set up local "intranets" for storing and accessing data for running their organizations. However, the sheer amount of available information is posing increasingly more difficult challenges to conventional approaches.
A major difficulty to overcome is that information relevant to a purpose of a user is often dispersed across the network at many sites. It is often time-consuming for a user to visit all these sites. One conventional approach is a search engine. A search engine is actually a set of programs accessible at a network site within a network, for example a local area network (LAN) at a company or the Internet and World Wide Web. One program, called a "robot" or "spider," pre-traverses a network in search of documents and builds large index files of keywords found in the documents.
A user of the search engine formulates a query comprising one or more keywords and submits the query to another program of the search engine. In response, the search engine inspects its own index files and displays a list of documents that match the search query, typically as hyperlinks. When a user activates one of the hyperlinks to see the information contained in the document, the user exits the site of the search engine and terminates the search process.
Search engines, however, have their drawbacks. For example, a search engine is oriented to discovering textual information only. In particular, they are not well-suited to indexing information contained in structured databases, e.g. relational databases, voice related information, audio related information, and the like. Moreover, mixing data from incompatible data sources is difficult in conventional search engines.
Another disadvantage with conventional search engines is that irrelevant information is aggregated with relevant information. For example, it is not uncommon for a search engine on the World Wide Web to locate hundreds of thousands of documents in response to a single query. Many of those documents are found because they coincidentally include the same keyword in the search query. Sifting through search results in the thousands, however, is a daunting task.
As another example, a personnel administrator might be interested in an employee's choice of health plan, but an MIS administrator would be more interested in which computer the employee is using. Therefore, the user has to sort out which documents and databases are relevant and which are irrelevant for a particular goal.
Unfortunately, conventional techniques are unable to present information based on, or catered for, the specific user receiving same. In addition, conventional techniques are unable to present different forms of information to the user as retrieved from one or more information sources. For example, existing content customization addresses only individual interest and needs. Further, existing call center technology addresses the same set of information, for example, between the customer and the customer support agent.
We have discovered that different users are unable to examine multiple versions of information depending on the business objectives and required functionality. We have further discovered that multiple versions of information are not based on either user-selectable options or systems-defined privileges.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for different users to examine multiple versions of information depending on the business objectives and required functionality, and/or personal preferences. There also exists a need in the art for multiple versions of information to be accessible to different users based on either user-selectable options or systems-defined privileges.